It's sweeps week for the Washington Scandal Soap Opera. After
over two months of murmurings in little-read news columns (sounds familiar),
the news that columnist Robert Novak identified a CIA operative by name
in print is finally making the front pages. Novak attributed
the leak to a Bush administration official, and Karl Rove and Cheney's
chief of staff are just two names being bandied about. The Justice Department
is investigating the source of the leak, which the Bush administration
hopes didn't come from too high up on the food chain. Democrats are calling
for Attorney General John Ashcroft to recuse himself from the investigation,
considering most people on Bush's staff are not so strange bedfellows
to Ashcroft. (Karl Rove was a paid consultant for three Ashcroft campaigns
in Missouri, and senior another Bush aide was once Ashcroft's chief of
staff.) Plus, Ashcroft owes Bush big time. After Ashcroft lost a senate
election to a dead man, Mel Carnahan, the president tapped Ashcroft to
be AG. This whole thing stinks. And the Bush team, like the polite people
they are, will ignore the stench that comes when someone takes a dump
on the White House lawn. Let's hope the rest of America's nose knows.

Drink lots of fluids, America. The amount of Americans without
health insurance jumped nearly 6 percent in 2001, to 43.6 million,
the Census Bureau announced Monday. That's 15.2 percent of the population
with no coverage. If 15.2 percent of people were, say, unemployed, The
Black Table bets something would be done about it. Happily, states care
a little more about kids than they do about adults; 88.4 percent of all
children are covered. And here's a shocker, college-aged kids: You're
less likely than any other age group to be insured. Too old for kids coverage
and, in this economy, chronically unemployed or underemployed. And lest
we forget the great state of Texas, where our president whet his executive
appetite as governor - 24.1 percent of people there have no health coverage.
The fact that the richest nation in the world cannot keep its own people
healthy and cared for makes The Black Table ill. Lucky for us, we've got
insurance.

Don't look for the white
smoke just yet. The Vatican is trying to squelch speculation about
the Pope
John Paul II's frail health and pending death this week after a German
magazine quoted a Cardinal saying the pope was "in a bad way."
The pontiff, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, can no longer walk
and often requires assistance to complete prayers or sermons. Last week,
the pope named 30 new cardinals, who will eventually elect his successor
upon the pope's death. The announcement was months ahead of the schedule
assumed by Vatican watchers, encouraging the idea that John Paul II will
die in a number of months. Also not helping the Vatican spin machine is
Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, who said Thursday the pope was
"dying" and "approaching
the last days and months of his life."

Can't the government release any good news this week? The rate
of hiring is slower now than it was in the recession of the early
1990s (Remember what saved that? The Internet. Great.), the Bureau of
Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. In the fourth quarter of 2002, 7.8
million jobs were lost and only 7.7 million were created. In the late
1990s, people were unemployed an average of 13 weeks. Now, unemployed
Americans spend, on average, 19 weeks looking for a new gig. All this,
despite the fact that the recession ended in November 2001 (Really, it
did. We're sure about that. You just can't really tell. Just like noticing
growing grass.). Finally, companies tried to increase production without
hiring more workers, and somehow managing to pull it off. So until the
next Internet shows up, just sit tight, folks. This is going to take a
while.

The people of California need more hot, groping action. After
an embarrassing expose in the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, Arnold
Schwarzenegger apologized for "behaving badly" toward women.
The Times interviewed six women who said Schwarzenegger touched
them in a sexual way without consent. Yawn. If the people of California
get upset about this instead of being outraged the recall is happening
at all, The Black Table has even less hope for the place.

*BT*

Aileen Gallagher, author of three
children's books, (and another one, about muckraking, on the way!)
writes Weekly Rundown every Friday.